Copasetic Flow

  While analyzing the skip path of a a 5-watt QSO I made last week from the San Francisco to Argentina with Project TouCans, I stumbled across a set of NOAA resources that completely changed how I look at ionospheric conditions. From real-time aurora dashboards to animated MUF forecasts and electron flux data, these tools offer hams powerful insights into propagation—and some surprises along the way. I made a grey line QSO from the campus of City College San Francisco to Argentina with our 5-watt Project TouCans rig last week. Last night, KO6BTY and I found ourselves deep in the rabbit hole of ionospheric conditions. What started as curiosity about the Kp index and whether aurora activity might have influenced the QSO's skip path, led us to discover some powerful NOAA resources. From aurora dashboards and global ionosphere forecasts to animated MUF predictions and GOES electron flux data, these tools give ham radio operators new ways to understand HF propagation, F2 layer behavior...

  Live portable ham radio from San Francisco’s Presidio with a clean take-off toward the Pacific. Route via PresidiGo, light wire vertical, and a crystal-locked 14.0574 MHz start. I keep local times in the story; the QSO map is in UTC. I arrived downtown at Embarcadero Station at 15:20 PST yesterday with Project Toucans , a portable ham radio. There was a newly married couple, still in their dress and tux, waiting to ride the cable car up towards California and Powell. I was waiting for the PresidiGo bus out to the Presidio. It's a free bus out to the park that passes through downtown several times a day. I hopped on the bus at 4 PM downtown. After a few stops at 4:07 PM PST, the bus was completely full. Interestingly, when we arrived at the first Presidio stop at 4:15, almost everyone got off and exited the Presidio back towards town. I don't know why. The bus winded through the rest of the Presidio towards the transit center. The center is right in front of the new park, cal...

 There's been a lot of talk about what is and isn't homebrew lately. I started hearing the all-in-good-fun contention around the Soldersmoke DC Receiver Challenge . A few days back, the conversation wandered over to the comments section of a HackaDay post. In that post, I found the following quote from The Tao of Programming :  "When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas." While it's cobbled together from modified kits, TouCans, suspended in its dipole beneath a Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory rain shield, will always sit in my heart as a manifestation of "the simplest harmony between machine and ideas" That makes me wonder if there should be a catetory known as a homebrew system. Sure, TouCans has kits, but they're modded to fit the application. They're also powered and controlled by a homebrew Darlington array buffered momentary contact relay (keyer) and a latching relay (power),...

 I just saw a heartening post with respect to the gang's and my quest to see if Agent Sonya could have built her own radio rig. Pete, one of the presenters on Soldersmoke even mentions W1REX in the post in conjunctions with this transmitter schematic : Rex is better known in these parts as the ham that produces RockMite and Tuna Topper kits that populate the innards of Project TouCans. Getting back to Agent Sonya , and also to safety, I was heartened to see Pete mention a supply that had occurred to me for plate voltage and current: nine-volt transistor batteries. Gone forever, apparently, are the B cells of yore, but we can definitely string together 9 volt cells. I wandered if there were issues with this type of supply I'd missed. There aren't! The post and the circuit above also answered a question I'd often wondered about with respect to keying tube circuites. That MPSA92 looks pretty hefty what with its 300 volt rating. It is and it isn't. the maximum curren...

 I haven't tried this before, but it was a lot of fun. On this video QSL, I explained what was going on with the rig, (Project TouCans), and the Morse code within the QSO with N4GO in words on the video as the QSO was in progress. New video style for N4GO de KD0FNR The map below is for the entire POTA activation. It shows RBN spots as 'glowing' lines this time and QSOs as solid lines, (like always.) You can click on any of the signal paths to get more inforatmion about it. You can click the play button on the lower lefthand control panel to animate the map so you can see the QSOs as they occurred. QSO/RBN  Map for the 2025-05-20 KD0FNR US-0757 POTA Activation

 I didn't manage to activate this El Paso, TX adjacent park this time, but the innovative antenna KO6BTY and I prototyped back in December did a pretty good job in kinda lousy band conditions! Then, I had to flee the dust storm and head for Albuquerque to catch a plane the next morning. Project TouCans watches the dust storm roll in with its big brother Park: US-3012 Franklin Mountains State Park near El Paso, TX. As is usual for my trips to New Mexico, my radio ops over the weekend were all car transit. Radio Details: Rig: TouCans and a Stick on the only band it uses right now: 20 meters The radio worked well considering the antenna was taped to a rest area trash can. Propagation in general was bad, but I learned a few ways to make things better with respect to the trash can. The rig does better when the insulated antenna wire is not touching the trash can lid. Go figure. It makes sense, but still. Go figure. Here's a closer view  of how the antenna was mounted, although you...

 What a gorgeous day to hang out in the mountains! I drove a bit outside of Las Cruces, NM over the weekend to play radios! KO6BTY first activated this very spot in the park using TouCans and a vertical antenna in December of last year. I used the same setup this time with one change. Instead of using a tent pole as a mast, I actually remembered to take the carbon fiber fishing pole we usually use off the airplane with me this time. You can see TouCans enjoying the view out over the White Sands Missile Range in the picture to the left.  Propagation wasn't spectacular either afternoon, so no off-the-continent DX, but I did get pretty good coverage of the United States and a few QSOs into Canada! I'll have more updates on the park activation later, but for now, here's the animated QSO map.

 The Soldersmoke blog pointed out an interesting post that was a focal point of a larger book review for "Agent Sonya: The Spy Next Door". The post's author was quite convinced that the key protagonist of the nonfiction tome could not and did not construct her own QRP communication rig in the 1930s as stated by the book's author. I beleive Agent Sonya could have constructed the rig  More about the book on the publisher's site The Soldersmoke post The focal review post The 1936 Radio Handbook So, as I was saying: I, for one, believe. I'll admit up front, I didn't have time to read the entire linked post. The following assumes that the issue was Sonya being able to build a transmitter in 1939 for use from Switzerland to Moscow. The short version? It should have been the picture of simplicity.  As an aside and a bit of a bona fides, we routinely QSO from San Francisco to Texas and beyond. That's the same distance as Switzerland to Moscow. I grew up in a ...

 TouCans is back up and running! The battery noise is also just gone! One issue caused both the noise and the key stoppage. The ground wire connection from the keyer relay was in the process of breaking away during the fixes last week. This led to the noise I heard in the rig. It also led to the wire, of course, actually detaching which kept the keyer from working. KO6BTY soldered the ground connection back this morning, and TouCans is back up and running well! Here's what the noise before the fix. This is what a wire breaking in TouCans does. The new battery is doing a good job. Here's how the RBN saw TouCans right after the fix.

 Note: The following will probably change over time, and is not ready for primetime. It's in the nature of a lab book entry so that I don't lose information about changes to Project TouCans.  I dodged a lot of near disasters this weekend by waiting to make sure I understood what was going on before acting.  The day before what I'm going to detail here, the Pico-W that's been in in outdoor service on TouCans for just over a year gave out. It was the curse of the Butterfield Overland Trail. I may never activate that park here in San Francisco. Not only do I not make many QSOs at the locations I've tried, the rig also tends to become damaged in one way or another. This time, the Pico-W jsut wouldn't boot after I got home. It also wouldn't respond to a direct USB connection anymore. When I replaced the Pico-W, I thought we'd done a better job of revision controlling our code than we had. I loaded code onto the new Pico-W, and nothing! I assumed the Darlingto...

 The Nashua Area Radio Society did a series on the RockMite! Part 3 is about the transmit oscillator which I have to admit, I did not completely understand. Varactors kind of rock!

 I've spent a lot of time getting Project TouCans' straight key back up and running better than ever before this month, and it finally paid off! I made a QSO with N2KPJ this morning! That's San Francisco to New York on 5 Watts! Hopefully I'll have a video QSL later, but in the mean time, There's a look at the station as it appeared this morning, indoors and everything! (Well, I was indoors. The rig was still outside.) Videos I've also cleaned up my dit/dah timing in a week's worth of practice . Here's my latest:

  US-4571 at City College San Francisco, around sunset is one of the best propagation spots in the city for Project TouCans and a Stick. I discovered this a few months back when I had a little time to kill before Cantonese class. Given, TouCans isn't quite as compact as a KH-1, but it's not much bigger than some people's water bottles, and therefore pretty easy to carry around for just-in-case POTA activations. I haven't made any calls to Europe or Sweden from this QTH yet, but I did wind up with two QSOs to Maine in my log from my latest afternoon POTA activation.  I hit the park, quite unintentionally, at the sweet spot for racking up activations. The first activation ran from about 2300 UTC till midnight. The second one started immediately afterwards and lasted about another hour. Park Details: Getting to the park is a piece of cake since it sits near five different transit routes, specifically, the 29 , 43 , 49 , K-train , and the 8 , not to mention the Balboa Park ...

 I heard last night that Chuck Carpenter W5USJ is a silent key. He passed on December 2nd. Chuck was a fun person and a great mentor for all things Rockmite on the groups.io Rockmite forum . His advice was instrumental in the creation of Project TouCans and he even mailed a few toroids to KO6BTY and I when we were working on removing RFI sources from the earlier wired version of the project. Reading through Chuck's site this morning, I found a reference to SWBCI . Having never heard the term before, I googled it. And found not much, mostly references to The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. I tried again adding ham radio to the search and was rewarded with a link to a SolderSmoke post from March of 2010! If you look through the posts on that page you'll find things about shortwave broadcast interference, sunspots, WSPR, and safe-ish car tube based radio circuits! There's so much stuff! Bill had and continues to pull off the advice of Jeff Tripplett t...

 I was able to hop over to this park twice, once before, and once after work. Operating portable with a vertical antenna netted me almost no foot traffic attention which was kinda surprising and also kinda nice. This will all get updated as I go (or not) Park: US-0795 World War I National Monument Getting There: I walked to the park from my Mt. Vernon Square area hotel. I took transit back though! I walked up a few blocks to the nearest metro station and took the Red Line east where I connected with a northbound Yellow Line to Mt. Vernon Square, the end of the line for that train. Radio Details: I used the rig's new configuration that's getting me into  so many urban parks: TouCans and a Stick. Trees on the East Coast seem to have more branches that the ones in San Francisco, so I was able to just place the vertical in the tree with no tape. The branches held it up. The tree still had most of its leaves and was quite wet. I suspect this was the main difference cause of propag...

 A seagull had a delicious crab breakfast, be sure to checkout the video QSL with VE7JYD below for all the details. Park: US-0757 San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park Park: If I get going early enough in the morning, I get to take the Powell St. cable car to this park. Alas, this particular morning I got a late start so I took the MUNI 30 . Radio Details: This was one of the first outings with the new Anderson PowerPole connectors inspired by Ham Radio Workbench . They worked well. You can see the rig without the antenna attached below. Note that our antenna is now also color-coded. Frankly? That's a bit too much organization for my taste :) QSO/ RBN spot map: Happenings of Interest   Right as VE7JYD called in a seagull started working on its breakfast—a crab—on the beach to the side of the station.  You can see the video below in the album of recorded QSOs! I've been working on this on and off for the last week or so. I don't know that I'll keep it up becau...

 Just saw this link to a tiny, gorgeous, transmitter on the GRQP forum via DL2KI .

 I had an interesting failure with TouCans a day ago. TouCans handily activated a park a day last week. Then, yesterday, when I pulled on the antenna wire just a bit, (I promise), the RockMite keyer rebooted which is never a good sign. I adjusted the wire again and the rig audio went off. What had actually happened was that the power supply had shut itself down. I inspected the interior of TouCans and immediately wondered if the power leads to the Tuna Topper ][+ amplifier had shorted on the tuna can. I unhooked the power lines to the amplifier and tried again nothing. Leaving the power lines detached, I decided to check if the power supply would take a charge. It would. I tried again and the RockMite, (as evidenced by its keyer), booted!  I left everything for a bit before, this morning reassembling the rig with the power lines to the amp re-attached along with the RF output line that I had accidentally broken in the process. I checked the bias voltage to the power transisto...

 Project TouCans has been flying with its power source onboard for several months. It occurred to me I've never documented the power system in its entirety. The Battery The foundation of the power system is an Imuto potable laptop charger Using this charger as a power supply for TouCans has two advantages. First, it fits in a Progresso soup can, so it fits the form factor of the rig that's more often than not flying suspended in its own dipole antenna. Second, it has two USB-C ports. One is attached directly to a USB-C power deliver breakout board that then feeds the the latching relay that serves as the on/off switch for the rig's radio and amplifier. The other USB-C port sports a short USB-C thunderbolt cable protrudes from the can and allows the battery to be charged without opening TouCan's case. Choosing the Voltage So, we have a supply that provide up to 100 Watts. But at what voltage? That's what this gadget , an Adafruit HUSB238, determines. It's jumper...